I was working in the maintenance department of of a property management company in Richmond, VA. I fielded calls from folks asking if they should evacuate their 5 story building. Up to you I said.

Then I had to deal with a crappy business owner contracted for facilities work in the CapOne buildings. No paper towels in the bathrooms, because his crew sucked... He told me "The country's at war, I'm going home to be with my family." His contact was cancelled at the end of the month. Because in this world, shiat still occurs and you still should wash your hands. The world still keeps going. We were all in shock and I went home early where my sister in law was glued to CNN and eating all of my food.

In 1996 my husband died on September 6th.

So I didn't like September at all.

My father died 5 days after the towers fell on 09/16/01.

Then I really didn't like September at all.

In 2006 my daughter was born at 4:02am on September 11th.

Happy 9/11? Hmm... it may be happy for some, and not so happy for others. YMMV

I was in the air at the time, in flight training in a small airplane (far out in the upper midwest). When we were on our way back and talking to ATC they were VERY agitated and telling us to land immediately (which we were doing anyway), and they wouldn't tell us what was going on. I found out about it when we walked back into our lobby and it was on the TV. I didn't fly again for a couple of weeks due to the flight restrictions.

We were in grad school, and I was sitting in a meeting. A very boring meeting. A professor poked her head in and said something like "did you hear the news? A plane hit the World Trade Center." Then she added, "but don't worry, they're saying it's only a small plane and that everyone's okay."

The thought stuck in my head for the rest of the meeting, which lasted another few hours. We started before the attacks, so no one knew what was happening.

Imagine my surprise when I got home and turned on the news.

\remember where I was standing when I heard about OKC bombing\\and the Columbia disaster

And, for the record, we had it on on TVs a floor down from my job, and while people went downstairs to cry and watch in some morbid fashion, I stayed at my cubicle listening to this, which had just come out that day:

Happy subby? My 15 year old daughter's first memory is watching her father cry when he finally made it home that day. The only 'happy' thing about that day is that most of us came home that day - eventually.

Walked into work and my buddy walked over to tell me a plane hit the world trade center. I bounced back and forth between Fark and our TV room the entire day.We had co-workers in Manhattan calling me asking wtf was going on. Some dumb lady that worked for us stunned me with one reaction- she complained how she will be stuck in NYC unable to fly home.I heard fighter jets flying over my house that night. Very weird.

i was just days from turning 16, sophomore in high school, i remember we had a class ring information thing going in the gym and i passed by one of the tv's in the hallway where i saw the first tower on fire and "plane hit WTC", i really didn't have any more information than that so i went on to the gym thinking "oh it's just a cesna or something"

after the class ring thing i went back to biology class when the teacher basically said "we're not having class", turned the tv on right as the second plane hit the South Tower... everybody just sat there stunned for an hour in complete silence, i've never experienced anything like that since then...

my third class was a web design class, and that's where i found fark.com and also when the towers fell, i just remember everybody going through the motions of going from class to class talking about what was happening, only my german language teacher wanted us to focus on class learning

this is back before kids had cell phones so nobody really spoke to their parents until they got home

what a week that was, i'll always remember that tuesday being super beautiful weather wise

I was in my office and my wife called me when the first building was hit. There weren't any TVs available, so my only source of news was the internet which quickly became 'Fark was my only source of news' since people were posting links from smaller sites and people like corporate mofo who lived in NY were taking pictures and posting them for us to see.

9/11 is what hooked me on fark and I don't think a day has gone by that I don't look at fark to see what's happening in the world.

/it's surreal going back and reading all the posts and incorrect information from that day in the threads. Utter chaos.

Getting ready to leave for my 9:30 accounting class when one of my roommates mentioned it. I thought it was just a small private plane or something that had hit it rather than a commercial airliner. After class I came back to the room and was looking for more info when I came across Fark for the first time.

/for the past couple of years 911 Truthers have become more annoying than 911 Never Forgetters

I was getting ready for work heard a "plane hit the world trade center" and I thought it was some putz in a prop plane. My bedroom had a good view of the towers, as it was a clear day, but all I saw was some smoke. I had no idea what it was until I was on the way to work. I was listening to the radio and one of the hosts from a different time slot called in and was giving an eye witness account (he had an apartment with a good view of the towers) and in the middle of a sentence, he started screaming about a plane hitting the other tower. it was crazy how he went from a calm description to "HOLY SHIAT!" in a second.

Work was pretty much ground to a halt and I was maybe there for 2 hours, then I went to my brother's house, watched some cable new channel (CNN I think).

Tuesdays were typically Magic Draft at the my game shop, and for whatever reason, I called to confirm it was canceled and he said no. The comic shop owner was the first person to tell me that "That's what they want us to do. If we cancel, we let them win." There were only 4 of us there and we had a good time and just a few hours talking about the attack.

Woke up to the news while in Idaho, visiting for my wife's grandfather's funeral. It was horrible--being in Idaho, I mean. Everyone there was sure that the army base near Boise would be the terrorists' next target. Good times.

Bobby and I had been scoping out these tall buildings in the city for weeks, setting up our jump. The day dawned clear, cold and bright. We took the stairs to avoid attention. Must have been more than a hundred floors. Took us almost an hour to hike it to the roof. Slipped the lock on the door, and scaled the suicide fence. This was it! We were ready to go. Bobby steps around to the other side of the roof just as the screech of a nearby landing jet splits the morning. Suddenly... earthquake! I'm thinking to myself, "An earthquake in NYC?!? Well, stranger things have happened." I look around for Bobby, but i think he was smoking a doob of some nasty dank around the other side of the building. Dumb bastard was never any good at getting the seeds out. The smoke was thick, and horrible-smelling. I yelled, "Bobby, your weed sucks! I'm outta here!" and leaped over the side. Ran into a few other jumpers on the way down, but the rushing air must have blurred my vision, because I swear it looked like they didn't even have any parachutes on or nothing. Pulled my cord and floated to a nice running exit about a block and a half from the building. Bobby must have not been far behind me because a bunch of people were pointing at the sky and talking amongst their selves. I didn't wait to see. Packed up my chute on the run and hit the subway north. Got back home in Poughkeepsie and turned on the TV with the volume off. News was on. Damned if Bobby's burning roach hadn't set the top third of the building on fire! Tired and stoned, I passed out and slept clear until the next day.

9/14 story: Since US airspace had been closed, my little vacation was delayed 2 days. STL had been choked w/ would-be passengers when they announced all flights scheduled after noon were cancelled. They didn't know how to manage the mammoth crowd. I was one of the last people out of the terminal; all the workers were headed home.Boarding my TWA flight, I paused to give the plane's fuselage a smacking kiss. Taking a seat, I was about to hear one of the best short speeches ever, from the pilot. TWA was in the midst of a sale to American and perhaps his job was in doubt...We were sincerely thanked for our courage to climb aboard. He advised: "If you see anyone, ANYONE displaying the sort of behavior we've all heard about on the news, you have my permission to begin throwing loose objects at that person. You may throw books, laptops, ice from your drink, even take off your shoes and throw them. Bombard that person. I will steer the plane to the nearest airport and we'll let the authorities handle it from there." The whole plane broke into applause and cheers.

I was hung over and out of work. My wife called me from work and woke me up stating a plane flew into the WTC. I glanced at the TV, said what a terrible accident, and went back to bed. About 45 minutes later she calls back (in a panic) and says a 2nd plane hit. Quickest I got over a hangover in my life.

Was coming in from 2nd period PE in my freshman year of high school. Walked into my coaches office and watched as the towers burned. Do not remember if the 2nd plane had hit or just hit as I recall seeing it do so. But it could of been a replay. Third period English, I watched the towers fall.

I got into work a little late. I had just bought a giant TV (well, for those days - 55" projection) and as I walked the block from our parking garage to our office one of my employees drove up to the front of the building, screamed something unintelligible, and ran inside. Naturally I ran too.

When I got upstairs everyone was crowded around the only radio in our small office. We heard the second plane hit on the radio news.

After that, we sent everyone home - and most of them came to my house, to watch the carnage on the big screen.

//CSB: Broke up with a girl I was dating not long after that for multiple reasons, one of which was her quote "That whole World Trade Center thing kind of makes me sad".

How did you get out when visibility went to zero? I blindly found my way to 160 Broadway and beat the basement door down with a fire extinguisher. Ended up exiting through the Subway tunnels. An emergency ladder a few blocks away.

Did you stay on the surface? It must have been rough that way.

I turned and was able to run around the corner and ran into the first building....avoiding the cloud for the most part.

Working on a natural gas storage well in BFE southern Indiana. All we had was the crew truck radio. The first images I saw were in a little country store where we were getting lunch on an old black and white tv. It was of people jumping to their deaths to escape the fires.

As traumatic as those event were for many of us (I was at the Pentagon and left more than one hour before the plane hit but had to drive back and see all the destruction first hand /csb), it's been already 12 farking years.

For how many years did we commemorate other tragic events the way we do 9/11? For instance, Pearl Harbor, as bad as it was, is remembered in a more humble and discrete way. I think we are past the point to just honor those who die that day in a more subtle and humble way, and stop all the jingoism and uber-patriotism that we see every 9/11 as it had happened yesterday. We mourn and we don't forget but we do move on.

First of all, I'm surprised at all the outrage at subby. I took the headline as grim sarcasm, and the fact that subby is then inviting people to engaged in a reflective experience doesn't make it feel callous or mean-spirited to me.

Also, I'm equally surprised at the "this thread again?" comments. It may have been 12 years, but it's the kind of emotional experience that makes an imprint for life, and there's something valuable in occasionally turning to each other and exclaiming "holy crap, can you believe when that happened?"

My story. I had just graduated college and started an internship in San Francisco, living 3,000 miles from home. It was all over when I woke up and tried to access CNN. I was terrified seeing the images and remember feeling like I was really growing up - for the first time, I wasn't part of a family or an educational institution to mediate the impact of this event. My parents were stuck in Europe and I couldn't get a hold of them for days. It was surreal. My roommate came home from work and we just consoled each other all day. i freaked out at the sound of fire engines for weeks.

I was driving down a road that usually has steady traffic, but there was none. I was alone on the road. I remember thinking, holy shiat, I could weave between all three lanes if I wanted because no one is here to care. This is weird. Then I turned on the radio, to a station known for it's tasteless radio pranks. (They'd recently been in a bit of hot water for messing with the banks) The second plane had crashed but the towers were still standing. I thought, not funny at all, guys. I like a good prank, but this is not cool at all. Then I switched stations. Two planes, I thought, what are the odds? ( No coffee yet) Then they mentioned the Pentagon...

It sucked that I had nowhere to go but home with my two year old. I wanted to go somewhere and be with people, and there was nowhere to go. Every public place closed down.

How did you get out when visibility went to zero? I blindly found my way to 160 Broadway and beat the basement door down with a fire extinguisher. Ended up exiting through the Subway tunnels. An emergency ladder a few blocks away.

Did you stay on the surface? It must have been rough that way.

I ended up walking up to the GWB (196th st?)....it took a long time and I stopped at almost every bar along the way to chug a beer.

imapirate:I worked in a comedy club at the time. Tuesdays were amateur night. For some stupid reason we stayed open. One of our amateurs wanted to get out early so he told this joke (this was the actual Tuesday, 9/11/01):

"I wonder what it was like on those planes this morning. 'This is your captain speaking. If you look to your left there's a lovely view of the Statue of Liberty. If you look to your right, there's Stacy making some copies."

Room cleared faster than you could blink.

I would really like to know who that comedian was, would I recognize their name?

EyeballKid:And, for the record, we had it on on TVs a floor down from my job, and while people went downstairs to cry and watch in some morbid fashion, I stayed at my cubicle listening to this, which had just come out that day:

Was in school for my AFSC training as a satcom tech at Ft. Gordon, GA. Someone walked in the classroom and said, "A plane just hit the Pentagon". We all pulled out our cellphones (that we were definitely not supposed to have while in uniform), confirmed the news, then looked around the room and let out a collective, "Ah, fark." Everyone's planned assignments went from missile telemetry at Edwards or satellite tracking at Peterson to "You're going to a combat comm base, and you're going to combat base, and YOU'RE going to a combat comm base! You're ALL going to combat comm bases! Hurray!"

CarnySaur:I was at work, and a coworker told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I thought he meant a small propeller-type plane, so I said "Oh." and kept working.

Similar to mine. I had just gotten in to the office and everyone was standing around a computer. Someone told me that the plane (which, like you, I assumed was a small plane) hit. I think I said something flippant and he repeated it, making clear that this was serious. A few minutes later, they shut down our Cambridge, MA, high-rise office building and sent everyone home. I took a cab instead of the T, just in case, and watched the rest of the events unfold from my living room. I think I got there just as or after the first building collapsed.

I was on my way to work in a skyscraper in Seattle. I remember a sense of disbelief. I went to work anyway. Many people skedaddled home because "yo, tall building." This seemed illogical to me, so I continued to work. The main office officially cut everyone loose by noon, so it was just me and a couple of attorneys left, We had billable hours to put in, ya know.

Funny/shiatty postscript: the main office freakin' docked the whole day's pay for all the hourly employees who left before getting the official go-ahead.

It was some time before I could wrap my head around the enormity of the whole thing.

It doesn't matter what I was doing, but as I watch my students in class this morning I realize how insignificant it is to most of them. They don't think about it, or really remember it (most of them were 3-4 years old at the time), and to them it's a day where they show lots of sad people on TV and the occasional replay of video of the towers or the Pentagon, or the field in PA. We live in rural Iowa, and most of these kids have never met people from other cultures or non-Christian religious backgrounds, so I hope that their perception of people of different colors and religions hasn't been forever tainted because of something that happened when they were small.

bsteiny:It doesn't matter what I was doing, but as I watch my students in class this morning I realize how insignificant it is to most of them. They don't think about it, or really remember it (most of them were 3-4 years old at the time), and to them it's a day where they show lots of sad people on TV and the occasional replay of video of the towers or the Pentagon, or the field in PA. We live in rural Iowa, and most of these kids have never met people from other cultures or non-Christian religious backgrounds, so I hope that their perception of people of different colors and religions hasn't been forever tainted because of something that happened when they were small.

Yep, one of our admins at our college asked for a moment of silence. I heard a large number of students in the hallways talking on their phones or joking around.

I was living in Boston, just out of college a year, and working at the (Boston) World Trade Center.

I was riding the shuttle bus from South Station to my building, reading the Metro or the Globe or something, half-paying attention to the news on the bus radio. I heard a frantic on-scene reporter talking about "buildings shaking, glass breaking" and thought "Huh... Musta been an earthquake in San Francisco this morning or something..."

And then I heard the in-studio host come back on the mic and say "...and that's the scene at the World Trade Center this morning." Still half-paying attention, thinking it was local news, I'm all "Zuh?" And look out the bus window at the Boston World Trade Center, my building, wondering what the hell's going on. I quickly pieced together what was going on, got off the bus and ran in the building, up to my office to see if people had heard.

Of course, they had the news on the large television in the conference room, and everyone was gathered around in stunned silence. I walked in RIGHT when the second plane hit, and everybody quickly realized this was no accident.

My mind racing, thinking of all my friends who live and work in downtown Manhattan (I'm a SUNY alum), I sat there with everyone else, watching, stunned. Then the first tower collapsed. Something strange happened in my head at that point, and I really have no clear memory of the next hour or so, except for a few key moments. I eventually got through on the crushed phone circuits to my then-girlfriend (now wife) who was in grad school in Upstate NY. I got a frantic call from my sister, who used to live in NYC, telling me to stay the hell out of the subways (non-issue, those were shut down too).

Then a very sweet girl I worked with gave me and a few other coworkers a ride home. And so we sat in the absolute worst gridlock traffic downtown Boston had ever seen. And yet, it was eerily calm. Everybody listening to the radio, all sorts of strange reports coming from all over the place, white house on fire, bombs going off in streets.

I finally got home to Brookline. Walked over to the liquor store on the next block (owned by a very sweet Persian family that was very upset over the day's events). Bought a bottle of vodka or gin, can't remember which. Sat down in front of CNN and just proceeded to drink. I felt it was the only thing to do.